How To Increase Your Ecommerce Conversions

Are you having trouble with abandoned carts and low conversion rates? Read on for advice.
Any savvy web marketer knows that having a well-trafficked website and having a high sales rate are two very different things. You can be great at attracting visitors through to your site via social media, PPC, or SEO campaigns, but getting them to convert to actual sales is a much more difficult.
We all know that sales is a numbers game. The average online business, according to Internetretailer.com, sees a conversion rate of between 1 and 2%. It’s obvious that if you have 1000 of visitors to your website each day, but you can only get 1% of them to convert, you either need to increase your visitors or boost your conversion rate if you want your business to remain commercially viable.
However, despite this simple logic, too often people don’t think of their sales funnel in these data-driven terms. They simply opt for the get-as-many-visitors-as-possible method and hope for the best. The problem is that this rarely works. Even if you have a great month with lots of conversions, there can still be underlying structural problems with your website that you’re not seeing because you are not paying close enough attention to your sales funnel. When a good month is followed by a terrible month, you’re scratching your head and wondering why.
If you don’t know how your website visitors are behaving when they choose—or don’t choose—to make a purchase on your site, it’s probably because you don’t have the proper tools to do so. Data points like bounce rate, stickiness, where people are navigating to your landing page from, and the amount of time they spend on each page can provide huge clues into what you’re getting right and what you’re doing wrong.
Though many people can be intimidated by these website metrics and indicators if they’ve never dealt with them before, there is really nothing to be afraid of. There are so many tools on the market such as HubSpot, Full Story, or even just basic Google Analytics that help provide you with easy to understand metrics and snapshots of what is working and what is not. If you feel you do not have the expertise or time to invest learning how to use these then you owe it to yourself to find or hire someone who can help your business do so.
In addition to paying closer attention to your website metrics and the sales journey of your website visitors, here are some other ways in which you can increase the conversion rate of your website:
Simplify your copy: People don’t want to click through to a website and be confronted with a wall of text. Meet your visitor’s attention span where it’s at and don’t inundate them with too much information from the start.
Split test your landing pages: Not sure if the image of the dog or the one with the baby will perform better when it comes to creating conversions? There is only one way to find out, and that is performing an A/B split test where you show different versions of your site to different visitors. Tracking how visitors respond to each page is a key follow up step, so make sure you don’t skip it.
Pay attention to abandoned carts: Some visitors may come really close to converting—they’ve put an item in their cart and entered their details—and then for some reason they leave the page. It’s essential for you to find out why this is happening. There may be a structural problem, like the page doesn’t load properly once the credit card info is entered, or something simpler like the last minute appearance of postage costs. Alternatively, perhaps all it will take is a follow up email asking them why they’ve left and offering a 10% discount. Investigating the issue will almost always lead to more conversions.
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